The quiet out here among the trees at Hartwick Pines State Park is unlike the quiet of a typical Michigan forest. It is more like the quiet found in a cathedral: expansive, penetrating, divine. Something little and lightweight, like a twig maybe, tumbles from a branch way up overhead, and you can actually hear it softly land on the ground -- because it's just that quiet here, and because there's nothing to get in the way of that little twig's fall.

And that's the next thing you notice: In between the broad green canopy overhead and the mottled red-brown of the forest floor, there is only empty space. The typical tangle of underbrush so familiar in the Michigan woods is absent. It's just trees. Very tall, very old trees.

This is what Northern Michigan looked like, and probably sounded like, some 200 years ago, which is how long some of these tall, old trees have been standing here -- though some have been here even longer. In fact, Hartwick Pines' 49-acre parcel of old-growth forest -- a rarity in Michigan, and the park's main attraction -- is home to trees that are up to 400 years old. If those trees could listen the way we listen, no doubt they would remember a time when it was not so quiet here, when the empty spaces rang with the sounds of axes and saws, and of wagons dragging staggering piles of lumber, and of the terrible splintering crashes as pine after giant pine was felled.

The lumber boom was a complicated period in Michigan history. Hartwick Pines was established, in part, so that we'd remember it, too.

The age of giants

A sobering map from the height of the lumber boom in Michigan. The areas shaded brown denote the original pine forests of Michigan from the 1881 census, and the areas shaded green denote the standing timber left in 1895. Map courtesy the Archives of Michigan // Michigan History Center

The age of giants

Back around the time when Michigan joined the Union, in 1837, what we now call "old-growth forest" would have been just simply "forest." In the state's northern reaches, white pines and red pines and hemlocks pushed their big trunks straight upward to heights of well over 100 feet. Except in occasional pockets where one of the old-timers had gone down, saplings and other thin-limbed underbrush would have had only sips of sunshine there below the high, dense canopy; not many grew to join the imposing ranks around them. You could call it the age of giants, and you wouldn't really be wrong.

That age ended when the lumbermen -- who had been steadily clear-cutting inward and upward from the East Coast to the Midwest -- finally hacked their way to the Great Lakes region. They'd come in search of "green gold," and did they ever strike it rich in Michigan. Millions of acres of untouched hardwood and massive pines stood waiting in the silent forests; millions of acres would be cut to the quick, logs piled high like stacks of cash before being milled and shipped to build the burgeoning cities back East. By the late 19th century, Michigan was the nation's largest supplier of virgin timber. The industry raked in four billion dollars between 1850 and 1900.

It's not a coincidence that this era of frenzied deforestation also saw the creation of America's first national park. Some folks knew what we were all at risk of losing.

"Even kind of right after it happened, around 1900, people were looking around and realizing, 'Oh, maybe we shouldn't have done this," says Hillary Pine, Northern Lower Peninsula historian for the DNR and the Michigan History Center.

But for all its destruction, the logging era also had been a boon to growth. For Michigan, the lumber industry was to the 19th century what the auto industry was to the 20th: It created jobs, wealth, technology, entire communities. For better as well as for worse, logging became part of Michigan's collective heritage.

A northerner named Karen Hartwick knew that, and knew it was worth sharing. After all, it was part of her personal heritage, too.

The lumberman's daughter

Karen Hartwick with her son Robert in 1907. Photo courtesy Michigan DNR/Michigan History Center

The lumberman's daughter

Most of Karen Hartwick's life was rooted in those old-growth forests up north.

She was born Karen Michelson in 1872 in Manistee -- at the height of the lumber era in one of Michigan's lumber boom towns. Her father, a founding partner at the Salling-Hanson lumber company, moved the family to Grayling for his work when Karen was a young child. The Michelsons did well for themselves in their new hometown: At its peak, Salling-Hanson operated three saw mills and was one of Michigan's most significant suppliers of virgin timber. Karen graduated as valedictorian of her class at Grayling High School, went to work as a stenographer for her father's company, and met and married a military man named Edward Hartwick, who would also join the family business by partnering with his father-in-law on a retail lumber operation. The forests were their livelihood.

So it was fitting that when her husband tragically died a few years later -- after contracting spinal meningitis while stationed in France during WWI -- Karen Hartwick sought a way to memorialize him in the pines.

A park preserved

"The Monarch," once the largest living tree at Hartwick Pines. Photo courtesy Michigan DNR/Michigan History Center

A park preserved

In 1927, nine years after her husband's death, Karen Hartwick purchased an 8,000-acre parcel of land from Salling-Hanson. The parcel, near Grayling, included an 85-acre grove of virgin pine trees that had been spared the sawblades because they were deemed not all that profitable by the lumber company. That same year, Hartwick gave the entire acreage to the state of Michigan, naming three specific conditions in the formal agreement: That the parcel's forests be protected, that a road be constructed from Highway 27 to the pines, and that a building be established somewhere on the property in memory of her late husband.

She had one other request, too. Because lumber had been her family's legacy, she asked that the park also house a museum dedicated to Michigan's logging history.

So in 1934 and 1935, the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps not only finished constructing the park's original Memorial Building, dedicated to Edward Hartwick, but also built two log cabins for the Hartwick Pines Logging Museum.

Hartwick Pines State Park was formally dedicated in July of 1935. Karen Hartwick got all of her wishes.

Photo courtesy Michigan DNR

These days, visitors come to Hartwick Pines for many reasons beyond the museum and the trees. There's mountain bike trails, cross-country ski trails and a section of hiking trail that traverses the Au Sable River. Two lakes, Bright Lake and Glory Lake (named after a pair of logging-era oxen), sit near the park's 100-site campground. Lovers tie the knot in the pretty, rustic chapel. Birders hoping to see as many rare birds as possible in their lifetime come from all over to check off two species from their "life lists:" the evening grosbeak and the Kirtland's warbler.

But the old-growth forest remains the heart of Hartwick Pines. Though the ancient pine grove is considerably smaller than it used to be -- a hurricane-force storm in 1941 leveled half the tract, reducing it to its current size of 49 acres -- it still feels immense. To stand among the trees is to feel, for a short time, what this corner of the world was like before so many of us arrived. You can see it in the way it looks different from the northern forests nearby. You can hear it in the deep, uncanny quiet. It's beautiful, and powerful, and humbling.